Dancing to the Precipice

by Caroline Moorehead (Harper; $27.99)

In 1820, at the age of forty-nine, Lucie Dillon, the Marquise de la Tour du Pin, started writing her memoirs, an endeavor that went on for thirty years and produced one of the great monuments of French history. Lucie began life as an aristocrat, débuting at Versailles at the age of eleven; at the beginning of the Terror, as friends and relatives fell to the guillotine, she fled France with her husband and children. Resilient and resourceful, the family thrived on a farm in upstate New York, where Lucie churned butter, traded with Indians, and played hostess to Talleyrand. A return to France brought Lucie and her husband into Napoleon’s inner circle; in later years, following an exile in London, they found favor with the restored Bourbon monarchy. Moorehead’s biography, drawing on a trove of previously unpublished correspondence, captures the rhythm of the radical contrasts in her subject’s life. ♦

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